The cliche about an iron fist in a velvet glove was around long before Dan Clowes tinkered with it to come up with the title for his first long-form serial in Eightball, and it survives to this day because, hey, let’s face : there are certain situations to which it just flat-out perfectly applies. Welcome to one such situation.

Jooyoung Kim is a German-based cartoonist with a real affinity for shrouding the dark aspects of reality — as well as the darkly comic — within the most delicate, even precious, of surroundings and trappings, and in World Ceramic Fair, which is #98 in the Mini Kus! range from Latvia’s Kus! Comics, that delicacy goes beyond the pottery on display in the comic’s titular festival and extends into the artist’s own aesthetic approach. Kim incorporates (what I assume to be, at any rate) digital approximations of colored pencils…